CHAPTER XVIII.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Thompson, C. J. S. (Charles John Samuel)
Purgeing pills
The lohoch, the base of which consisted of honey or thick syrup, was a very favourite form of medicine for a cough, such as the lohoch demulcent, lohoch of fox’s lungs, and lohoch expectorant.
The julep was another ancient form of administration much in vogue. Balsams, of divers compositions, had great repute as expectorants. William Blundell in his diary (1681) mentions: “The Elder Lady Bradshaw sent a bottle containing, as we guess, about one ounce of balsam, which in her letter she calls ‘Balsam of Sulphur’. That it must be taken morning and night, three or four drops, naked and alone in a spoon; that it must be warmed before it will drop at all, by reason its thick and clammy.” The sugared oils were simply made by triturating various essential oils with white sugar, and usually given for their carminative action.
Another favourite vehicle was broth, generally composed of many and strange ingredients. We have come across the broth of calves’ lungs, broth of the bones of lizards, and broths made from snails, tortoises, woodlice, crabs, and vipers.
The recipe for the broth of viper we have taken from an old black-letter book, and is rather curious:—
“ Living viper
j.
Remove his head, tail and viscera, excepting his heart and liver, cut it into little pieces and mix it with the blood, and add—
Well water
12 ounces
in a close vessel, boil for two hours and strain, and the broth will be made.”
The materia medica of the old apothecary was largely drawn from the animal kingdom, the greater part of it being, no doubt, handed down from a very early period, when witchcraft and superstition exerted a powerful influence on the minds of the people.
Among the many curious things used, we find that the liver of a mad dog, or a wolf, washed in wine and dried in a stove, was employed as a remedy for hydrophobia. The nimble lizard had a reputation as a sudorific and antisyphilitic. Dried toads and the cast-off skins of snakes and adders, were administered in dropsy as a diuretic.
The horn of rhinoceros was used in epilepsy, and goat’s blood and eel’s liver as a cure for dysentery. The oil of frog’s spawn was celebrated as an application for chilblains. The jawbone of a pike and the spine of a lamprey in powder, were prescribed for leucorrhœa. Pepys mentions in his diary, that he wore a hare’s foot as a sovereign remedy against the plague, in which charm he seemed to place more faith than in the various plague waters that were recommended to him as unfailing antidotes for that terrible disease.
In the time of Edward I. there was a list of drugs recorded by the king’s physician, one Nicholas de Tyngewyke, in 1307, which throws an interesting light on the pharmacy of that period. The list includes distilled oil of turpentine, aromatic flowers for baths, carminative electuaries, plasters and ointments of various kinds, the oils of wheat, ash, and bay, water of the roses of Damascus, wine of pomegranates, remedies prepared from pearls, jacinths, and coral, and many other drugs. The king was taken ill at Carlisle, and the cost of conveying these remedies from London to that city amounted to £159 11s. 10d., the apothecary’s bill for the medicines being £134 16s. 4d.
In 1596 Sir Henry Winton, who was sent as ambassador by Elizabeth to Henry IV. of France, met with an accident while on his mission. According to the records “he was physicked with confectio alcarmas, which was composed of musk, amber, gold, pearl, and unicorn’s horn, and with pigeons applied to his side, and all other means that art could devise sufficient to expel the strongest poison, and he be not bewitcht withall”.
The apothecaries of the seventeenth century were not overburdened with the estimable virtue of modesty, as instanced in the following quaint announcement:—
“Cornelius Tilbury, sworn chirurgeon-in-ordinary to K. Charles II., to his late Sovereign K. William, as also to her present Majesty Queen Anne—address at the Blue Flower Pot, in Great Lincoln’s Inn Fields, at Holbourn Row (where you see at night a light over the door); and for the convenience of those that desire privacy, they may come through the Red Lyon Inn in Holbourn, between the two turnstiles, which is directly against my back door, where you will see the sign of the Blue Ball hung over the door.
“I dispose of my famous Orvietan, either liquid or in powder, what quantity or price you please. This is that Orvietan that expelled that vast quantity of poison I took before K. Charles II., for which his Majesty presented me with a gold medal and a chain.”